Honestly, an Orgrimmar where Thrall and Kalecgos weren’t able to talk Jaina down from mass murder, or one where Tyrande did not accept a peace-accord and went full Blood Moon on Orgrimmar, would be a terrifying scenario to pursue.
An Orgrimmar, flooded and full of spirits trapped by their horror and the lingering traces of arcane energy, and Water Elementals twisted by the horror their inflicted and have become Blood Tide Elementals, infested with Naga who have come to abuse the deep wells of elemental power beneath the city and feed the lost souls to their Faceless masters.
An Orgrimmar, full of Kaldorei who have taken the home of the Orcs as their own, full of dark and bloody versions of normal Kaldorei architecture, while the dark powers of Elune’s Blood Moon warps and corrupts both the Kaldorei who zealously patrol their new home and the moldering bodies of Horde civilians that nourish new, darkened Treants and other plant-life in the former heart of the Horde.
FFXIV has sharding in some newer zone areas too, and allows you go to the zone teleport crystal and queue up to switch to whichever shard you choose to. But that’s Bioware and Square Enix, two AAA studios who figured out how to add that to their game many years ago.
One of the problems is going outside of Org still subjects you to sharding and CRZ. The whole reason RP was suddenly packed into Org was because Blizz finally caved to us and said they’d turn off sharding in Org and Stormwind. It still exists in the other capitols. It killed off Tauren RP in TB, even. Org RP wasn’t just decided it was pigeonholed.
I think the goofiest part of it is that its sharding and mixing us with other realms…
If the shards are too full to support the amount of players that are on them, then why are we trying to fill them from other realms?
Its a really dumb and bad system.
When they first implemented it before Legion, back in MoP I think, at least then you always were on YOUR realm, and what shard/realm you were on was determined by the group leader, not this first come first serve mess.
Whenever they switched it from dedicated realms to this cloud stuff is when it went downhill… also when the servers became unbearably laggy when you had more than 20 people in them… Was a huge downgrade.
Exactly. The tech is there and has been for a while. For whatever reasons Blizzard has, it hasn’t been implemented in this game.
I think it’s either due to preference or some sort of tech limitation (something, something spaghetti code). I don’t envy the devs who have to work with it, though I wish Blizzard would dedicate the time and resource to get it done.
I was under the impression that the Cloud is just a big server hub in of itself though? I’m not very technically knowledgeable so I’m curious what makes that distinction different from dedicated servers?
Dedicated realms you had a server shard that was always up and thats where you would end up.
(the ones they used to auction away when they replaced them)
There are still server banks, and thats how the cloud works, but you just go wherever is open. Zones dont exist until someone goes in them, why you can go to places like Tol Barad and the timer will start, because you were the first one to load it.
Why you cant open up the map in Hellfire and look and see who owns the towers anymore, without being in the zone. You never know where you’re going to end up.
Picking a server based on time zone doesnt mean anything anymore. You’re not going to end up closer to where you live with a faster connection hopefully, you just get shunted to wherever. (example: Moonguard and WRA are different time zones but we share zones… explain how that works.)
This has been true for ages, for sure. I’m EST and have been on WrA since it opened. So have a lot of east coasties. I’ve never seen a problem with gameplay or RP scheduling tbh.